Man vs Tech: Google Drive

Google Drive: The Facts

Storage. You’re out of it, Google’s got it. Actually hundreds of companies offer online storage in “the Cloud” but Google is huge, reliable and is giving you 5GB free thanks to Tuesday’s launch of Google Drive.

Squirrel away documents (it incorporates Google Docs), photos, videos, PDFs and other files and you can cooperatively work in real-time on files as with Google Docs. The Drive downloads as a folder to your computer (and mobile – Android-only for now, unsurprisingly, but iPhone and iPad compatibility is on its way) and syncs whenever you drag a file to it. Storage is upgradeable: 25GB is $2.49/month (around £1.54), 100GB is $4.99/month (around £3.09) and you can go right up to 16TB. Which is Terabytes, or around 16,000GB – what are you storing, a few billion copies of War and Peace?

Ikea: Now Sells More Than Just Great Hot Dogs

Outside of a basketball game in the US, IKEA is the greatest hot dog seller on Earth. But it’s always bothered Man vs Tech: why have all that warehouse space simply to sell awesome hot dogs?

As it happens, IKEA does have another function: it sells technology. The Swedes have just announced a bit of kit that any wire-Nazi will enjoy and it’s called the UPPLEVA.

The system is a Full HD Smart TV fused into a slick AV cabinet housing a built-in Blu-ray player and storage for all your boxes, be that Sky+, Virgin, Xbox, PlayStation, router, audio… or if you’re Man vs Tech, all of them. And the wires? Hidden away. Although you’ll still have to plug it in somewhere.

So: great idea. The bad idea? It launches June 2012 in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Gdansk and Berlin, none of which are in the UK. But wait! There’s another roll-out in Autumn! Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway and Portugal. Oh…

So the really awful news is it won’t arrive here until 2013. Unless you go to the IKEA hot dog store and, while standing in the enormous hot dog queue, ask to speak to the manager and demand they bring the UPPLEVA to the hot dog store this year if you’re to continue your loyal hot dog-eating service. Alternatively, give them a ring.

Go On, Have A Good Cry

Depressed? You should get clinical help for that. But if it’s just a good cry you need, try Project Good Cry and join a social experiment. It’s all about a button, or rather, a special plug-in for the Chrome browser that places a button on YouTube videos that says ‘I Cried’. You press it whenever you cry at a video.

The metrics are logged and appear on the Project Good Cry website, where the experiment’s creators, Dee Kim and Bistin Chen, hope it may help answer the question, “What would the implications for digital space be if crying is embraced?”

The site lets you check out a Top 50 of the videos making people cry and as you’d expect, these include last moments with beloved pets, sad scenes from animated classics and… yep, social network wall fixtures, One sodding Direction. No word of a lie. I could have cried.